Curiosity (10 page)

One day, the three of them were brothers, creeping around in the bush, and the next, the grass gang was walking up the road and Cuthbert and Ben were part of it, loads of wet grass for the livestock on their heads, loads like haystacks – they were swaying under the weight of them and Henry knew them only by their skinny black legs. Sophie, a great beautiful girl they all admired, was driving them with a switch. Henry ran towards Cuthbert and Ben on the road, thinking to tease them when they couldn’t see him for their loads, and Sophie laughed at him and said, “You go back now, massa Henry, these boys be mine.”
Peter, the houseboy, was sweeping the veranda when Henry went back. “Henry vex,” he said sympathetically.

Darkness has fallen on the neighbour’s garden and in Henry’s room. The butler knocks; he’s come to light the lamps. Henry kicks a chair against the door by way of response. He pulls the bed curtains closed and curls into the cave of his bed. He’s at Halse Hall, he’s sitting at a table for his lessons and his father sits beside him. It seems that Father discovered Henry when Cuthbert and Ben were taken into the grass gang.

Mrs. Sutton from Sutton Estates is there (she is always there, she comes on horseback and stays for days) and she and his mother are in rocking chairs drinking glasses of rum punch, although they have only just finished their dinner. The dogs are out – everyone is worked up because a slave is missing. Sophie. Henry’s father requests that Mother and Mrs. Sutton sit somewhere else so as not to further distract the boy, but they will not. They sit on the veranda to admire the view of the Mocho Mountains and because the house is too hot – they are likely to suffocate, says his mother, if required to sit inside.

Father went to May Pen that morning to post a notice of the missing slave, but he is back now for Henry’s lesson. Father is teaching Henry because it has dawned on him that Henry speaks fluent Creole and precious little English. “You said he should not be one of those mollycoddled plantation sons,” his mother says. “And now you find reason to reproach me for what he is.” And so Henry must sit on the veranda and listen to the far-off baying of the dogs, and his father teaches him the history of Jamaica under the English. It begins with General Venables, from whose mistakes many lessons can be drawn. General Venables was sent by Oliver Cromwell to take the great Spanish island of Hispaniola. He anchored his ships at a beach he believed to be 10 miles from the Spanish stronghold of Santa
Domingo. In reality, Santa Domingo was 35 miles away. (
How many extra miles was that?
Father asks, and Henry says,
15
. Mrs. Sutton laughs and his father says,
No, 25
.) The men tramped through the jungle for days. They got dysentery and yellow fever and finally were forced to retreat. So Venables took to the sea again and conquered Jamaica instead, as a sop for Cromwell. But Cromwell was not impressed and had Venables thrown into the Tower.

The mournful sound of the conch rings out and Henry stirs. The two-hour midday break is over; the slaves will be returning to the fields. Mrs. Sutton gets up and comes to the edge of the veranda. Her hair is wet to her head with perspiration. She has an over-wide smile. “He was thrown into the Tower for cowardice,” she cries. “He pulled up anchor and sailed away in the dead of night, abandoning hundreds of men who had not yet gained the ships. And tell the boy why, Colonel De la Beche!” She does not give him a chance to speak. “Henry, precious, the silly man fled in the night because, in his addled brain, he thought he heard the Spanish army approaching. And the Spanish army was nowhere near. It was
fiddler crabs
migrating – that was the sound he heard in the jungle!” Henry’s father gives his chair a hitch in irritation.

Mrs. Sutton peers down the carriage road. The house is on high ground – you can see the whole plantation from the veranda. She points out that the slaves are still down at the cabin-line and out on the road. Henry can hear the dogs baying. Sophie will not be caught, he thinks – she will go to Spanish Town to look for Tom, who was sold last week. The dogs will never find her. They’re still on the plantation, following the bush paths where the duppies wander. His father turns to look at Mother, who has tied a turban around her head to hold her hair up off her neck, and he questions how much rum punch she is drinking
at this time of day. “My complexion needs replenishing,” she says, “from all this perspiration. Anyway, don’t bother about me. You should be going down. Go down and send them back to the fields.”

“Leave it to Tomkin,” Father says. He gives his chair another hitch. This is dangerous, because granny-sugar is pouring out of holes where the termites are eating it. Any minute now, that chair will collapse into a pile of hollow sticks, as others have done. He reaches for a clean sheet of paper and writes numbers on it. They’ll leave the history and switch to pure sums, which may be of less interest to their audience. Father sets Henry the sum of 22 and 41, and then leans towards him and says softly, “Consider how many tens are in each of them.” Then the houseboy Peter is at the edge of the veranda wanting to speak, an anguished expression on his face. He says in Creole that they have found an armadillo down at the creek. He is an Igbo – his Creole is unique to him. Henry repeats what Peter said for his father and mother. He translates it exactly, although he understands from Peter’s face that it is not an armadillo, it’s something else they’ve found, that Peter can’t bring himself to say.

“An armadillo!” says his father. “Let’s go down and have a look!” He goes eagerly down the steps of the veranda and Henry follows. They cross the sloping lawn and hurry onto the road, and by then, terrified, grieving cries are rising up from the creek, and people are running towards it from all directions. His father begins to run. Peter is running with them; he reaches down for Henry’s hand. When they come out into the creek bed, the whole plantation is there, and the slaves part so they can come through. Tomkin is splashing across the creek from the other side, the dogs on leash. Henry glimpses a figure lying at the creek edge (a duppy, the way its feet are splayed) and then his father yanks him up by the armpits and plunks him onto Peter’s back and shoves them back towards the road.

Henry rolls over in his bed. He tries to call up Sophie’s face, but the face of the woman he saw on display in Piccadilly has overlain it. But then he thinks of being out on the veranda early on a Sunday morning and he sees Sophie coming down from the provision grounds in the hills. She’s going to the market in May Pen, walking tall and proud with a stupendous tray of pawpaw on her head, and she flashes him a smile.

Eventually, Alger receives a letter from Henry’s mother. She has nothing to say to Henry. “I have nothing to say to Henry,” she writes in the only line Alger will show him, isolating it through assiduous folding. After two days, Alger lets fall the news that Henry and his mother are to settle in the coastal town of Lyme Regis when his mother condescends to send for him.
Lyme Regis?
Alger can cast no light; he endeavours to know as little as possible of his sister-in-law’s doings. On the subject of watering places, he tells Henry over tea and oatcakes of going to Brighthelmstone to take the cure. It was a nasty business. It involved drinking a gallon of sea water each morning and then surrendering to the will of the hired dippers, who, once contracted, ensured that you were fully submerged, whatever your final thoughts on the matter. “It was anti-septic,” he says, tea dribbling down his chin. “Anti-bilious. Anti-spasmodic. It did me a world of good.”

After the letter, Henry understands that his mother has abandoned him in Bristol until he shall make something different of himself. For his sins, he is sentenced to a season of whist with Alger, the Widow Rankin (Alger’s only constant friend), and Sullivan to make up a fourth. He writes to Clement pleading for money and for intelligence regarding his mother. Instead, a cart stops on the road and a case of books is delivered. Clement’s house has been heartlessly sold. After eight years, he’s been flung
from his rooms and would have perished on the pavement but for the charity of his old friend Marshall Bentley. Henry may have the books on loan for the duration. It’s a collection of titles recently talked about in West End drawing rooms. Most of the books have an unread smell and feel; many of them are uncut. Among them, though, is a worn edition of
Muller’s Artillery
, the forty octavo pages of which they were assigned to copy at Marlow. He was on
sea-mortars
when he was hauled away to the guardhouse. That’s his biggest regret, leaving his copybook behind, and the half-finished drawing of the sea-mortars, with their shaded chambers. He asks his uncle for money to buy a folio and charcoals, and sets to work where he left off.

The gardener comes in to pry the fireplace open. The upstairs maid is with him with a bucket of kindling. Winter is coming; it’s time he had a fire in the morning. They’ll start by burning the boards that sealed the fireplace. The nails squeak in the boards as the crowbar gains a purchase. And then the maid screams and scrambles back. Henry turns and looks with the gardener into the hearth. A pile of tiny bones, the remains of some terrible destruction. They’re intact, miniature skeletons. “Birds,” says the maid, crouching on the floor with her face turned away. “They flew down the chimney and couldn’t find their way out. This room’s been closed up since the war began. It’s birds, it’s terrible bad luck, Mr. Henry. Walter will clean them out.”

Henry has lit a candle by then and he holds it in the hearth. He can count seven or eight skeletons lying in a soft bed of ash and down. They’re ancient, intricate, anomalous life forms. It’s a desert scene – they perished of thirst.

“No,” he said. “Don’t. I’ll do it.”

He picks one out carefully and lays it on his sketching paper. It’s like picking up nothing. With its guts gone to dust, this is
what a bird weighs. It’s intact, its wings a close fan of quills. Its skull and beak curve downward, bent in supplication. At the end of long straight legs, claws clench in spasmodic appeal.

“Find me a box to put them in,” he says to the maid. “I want to draw them.”

SEVEN

inally, the Independent Chapel found a teacher, and every Sunday Mary sat on a bench with smaller children and learned her letters and the queer way they were used. She learned why pounds are marked
L
(it is the Latin
libra
) and why pence are marked
d
(for
denarius
), but why the English should choose to use Latin words for their own coin her teacher Mr. Pippen could not explain. He was a kindly man, but he lacked curiosity – the small store of his learning lay drying in his brain like the butterflies pinned into a collecting cupboard at the Philpots’. This was just the ragged school (so it was called in the town); her mother said she should be grateful the man could read and write. But in spite of Mr. Pippen’s dullness, in spite of the other students hiding sticks up their sleeves to poke her from behind when she was called on to recite, the ragged school, which had such a feeble effect on ordinary children, was a potent tonic to Mary and within four Sundays she could read.